Williams, Tennessee

Signed first printing of Williams's most enduring play, a beautiful copy in the iconic Lustig-designed dust jacket.

• Tennessee Williams (American).
• (New York): New Directions, (1947).
• 171, [1] pages.
• Signed by Williams on front free endpaper.
• Bound in original pink pictorial boards with design by Alvin Lustig, in original unclipped ($2.75) pink pictorial dust jacket echoing board design.

"Hollywood would never be the same after the release of Streetcar." —R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray

The broken dreams of a Southern belle are dramatized in Williams's best-known play, a hit on Broadway with Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando in the lead roles (both then virtually unknown). After its brilliant run on stage, Streetcar went through a groundbreaking adaptation into film, keeping many of the same people involved: Brando garnered his first Oscar nomination in the film, starring alongside Vivien Leigh. According to Geoffrey Shurlock, who was involved in the Production Code Administration that monitored the morality of motion pictures, Streetcar changed the landscape of how films could communicate drama for adult audiences: "Tennessee Williams was something new to movies... The stage got a shock from Tennessee Williams. We got twice the shock. Now we know that a good deal of what we decide in censoring movies is not morality but taste. It began with Streetcar" (quoted in Palmer and Bray). This first edition has since become famous in its own right for the brilliant pink jacket design by Alvin Lustig, a high point of New Directions' publications. Palmer and Bray, Hollywood's Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America.